Keywords

• Among all the revolutions that struck eighteenth-century Europe
• this survey analyzes one that deeply changed the relationship with the deceased. The ban on burying in urban churches and the use of new cemeteries outside the city separated the space of the dead from that of the living. Enlightenment Reason only saw partial victory: burials were removed from the ecclesiastical monopoly
• but the cult of the dead continued to be handled by the Church. This European burial reform showed special characteristics in the early period of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples. In the populous Capital
• modern cemeteries found it difficult to defeat the terresante
• hypogea where corpses had long been handled and treated. Here
• the Enlightenment death ethos was to challenge rituals going back to the concept of the «double burial» described by Robert Hertz in his famous Contribution